Estimated volume of eucalyptus plantations through ALOS satellite images

Estimates of wood volume, either in even or uneven-aged forests, is necessary for planning forest management, studies concerning carbon sequestration and natural resources conservation, as well as energy planning in regions where wood is the primary fuel for power generation. Such purposes mainly involve analysis of large areas, which leads to challenges that can be solved through remote sensing. Using multispectral and microwave data, respectively, from the AVNIR-2 and PALSAR sensors, both on board in the ALOS satellite, the wood volume of a commercial eucalyptus plantation located in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil was estimated using artificial neural. Neural networks emerged as a powerful machine learning technique, capable of modeling intrinsically nonlinear relationships that are present in the data. Thus, the obtained estimates for wood volume in the eucalyptus plantations showed a correlation coefficient with the corresponding observed volumes (forest inventory) of 0.99, a square root of the quadratic error (RQEM) of 0.3% and errors with amplitude between -1 to 1%. The efficiency of artificial neural networks for estimating wood volume in homogeneous plantations has been proven. The multilayer perceptron neural network was efficient in modeling the complex relationships that exist between multispectral, microwave and wood volume data, producing highly accurate estimates. Only a small amount of plots was sufficient to train the artificial neural networks in order to estimate volume. In addition, the fast convergence obtained by the BFGS algorithm allowed a comprehensive data analysis.